Starting Points

It was a gloomy day sometime in 1640, or at least, I like to imagine it was a gloomy, quiet day in Europe when Descartes, dressed still in his nightgown, sat down in front of his softly cackling fireplace and drew his ink bottle and paper towards him to compose the Meditations on First Philosophy.

It was a fundamental moment in the history of modern philosophy, of science, of rational human thought, one of the most profound, some would say, and of all the words Descartes penned, the ones that stuck with me the the strongest were those on certainty. The words pulled me in, and I felt, clutching my tattered little paperback, that I was right there with him, in the chair opposite him by the fireplace, drinking warm drink and listening to the rain patter on the roof outside.

“If anything can be doubted, even a little bit,” Descartes explained, then we cannot be entirely certain of it, now can we?

“Well,” I replied, “we can’t be entirely certain, of course.”

“No,” he went on. “And because the senses can, and have been deceived, then it is not entirely certain that they are correct, even now.”

“Well, how likely is that?” I asked, incredulously.

“Likelihood is not a factor,” he replied. “If the doubt exists at all, then we can never have absolute certainty.”

“Granted,” I replied, conceding. “Where does that leave us?”

“That leaves us with the realization that every single perception, everything we see, everything we touch, everything we hear, is open to doubt. We cannot have certainty of it.”

“Okay, so what can we have certainty of?”

“Well, I don’t know about you existing, because you are perception to me. But for myself, I know that I at least exist.”

“Why? Don’t you perceive yourself?”

“Yes, but that is not all. Think about this,” he said, raising his cup to his lips. I waited patiently as he finally lowered it and set it on the table nearby. He folded his hands and looked at me with a faint keenness in his eyes. “If I say that I do not exist, I am contradicting myself! How can I deny my own existence? I must exist in order to do so!”

“So basically,” I said, at length, “you can be certain of things which are self-justifying.”

“Yes. Or anything that would be contradictory to deny.”

It would be years later before I realized the full impact of what this meant, and it was then that I found a starting point for everything. Three starting points, actually, the only three things that I have found so far which are entirely self-evident.

1) I exist. Descartes spelled it out pretty clearly: to say otherwise would be contradictory.

The problem with this is, of course, that it rests on the axiom that reason is absolute, which many people don’t agree with. For them, I have the second point in my triune:

2) Reason is absolute and irrevocable, because to deny reason would require the use of reason. ANY conclusion arrived at would require reasoning, so it cannot be denied. I include, of course, all the Laws of Reason, such as A is A, and A is not B, and so on.

So here we have a good rule for knowing the certainty of things. If denying something would result in a logical absurdity, it must therefore be true, self-evidently and a priori.

The final part of these three un-disprovable axioms is the existence of God. I realize that this would controversial, and I never thought much of the Ontological Argument when I first heard it, but it seems pretty clear.

3) To say that God does not exist is a contradiction, or a logical absurdity.

I will use a modification of Anselm’s formulation of the Ontological Argument:

God is that entity than which nothing can be greater.

The concept of God exists in human understanding.

God exists in one’s mind but not in reality.

The concept of God’s existence is understood in one’s mind.

If God existed in reality, it would be a greater thing than God’s existence in the mind.

The final step to God’s existence is that God in reality must exist.

My interpretation of this argument is as follows, which I boil down to one easy step:
1) God is the greatest conceivable being.
What this means is that he is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, infinite, necessary (as opposed to contingent) and absolute.

Thus, one sees, that, by the very definition of God, God must exist. His existence is self-contained within himself.

And people ALWAYS respond to this by saying something along the lines of, “Oh yeah, well I can prove that something else is God then!” And they go and try to use this same line of reasoning to formulate the existence of a giant, divine, Chicken (Grasshoppers was Jordan’s pick). The problem with this is that if you use any kind of object in the place of God, that object is going to be something that is, by nature, finite. Look around you. Everything you see if finite. Nothing has an infinite existence except God (the nature of being in other spiritual objects, including the human soul, is something we’ll get into later).

So, because all material things are open to doubt, there are only three things we can be certain of, by virtue of their very nature.

1) The absolute nature of reason.
2) The existence of the Self.
3) The existence of God.

There may be other things which are absolute an undeniable, but I have not found them.